Memoirs by Archimandrite Nektary (Chernobyl) 1905 - 2000 As a young boy, still before the Revolution, I had a terrible dream: the south-west part of the sky was illumined by a bloody, glowing sunset, like a fire, and on this bloody sky was written in huge, shining letters the word, "the end." At that time I did not attribute any particular meaning to this dream. But I never forgot it. It was so vivid and stunning that my entire life afterwards was colored by the presentiment that this dream would definitely be fulfilled. And so it did. It began in 1917, and with each passing year it became increasingly evident that the world was coming to an end. In the beginning old Russia was destroyed, the Tsar was overthrown, the antitheistic regime came to power, and then began the annihilation of thousands of innocent people and the persecution of Christians on an unprecedented scale. Churches were blown up, monasteries were closed and blasphemously turned into the most disreputable places. All this was seen as the coming to power of the beast of the apocalypse. In recent years we see that the power of this beast is beginning to spread over the whole world. The process of apostasy, begun several centuries ago, is today approaching its final stage. We are entering the age of the apocalypse. And now the meaning of the dream I had so many years ago has finally become clear to me. My Father I was born in 1905, in the village of Utimovka, in the district of Kremenchugsk, Poltava province. My name in the world was Peter. I had two brothers and a sister; I was the eldest. My parents, Michael Ivanovich Chernobyl and Anna Longinova, were both of peasant stock, but my father, a capable and energetic man, taught himself gardening and agronomy and went to work for the railway, planting trees and flowers at train stations. Later he was invited to the district town of Alexandria, in the Cherson province. The town was twenty-five kilometers from Cherson, on the river Berezovka, where it fell into the Ingulets. Up to the time of the Revolution, the town numbered about twenty thousand inhabitants. Here it was proposed to my father that he create on a vacant parcel of land an agricultural nursery affiliated with the district pedagogical seminary. It was a sizeable plot, thirty hectares, and on it he laid out a flower garden, an orangerie, hotbeds, gardens, and fields for sowing. In this nursery, students at the seminary, future village school teachers, were given hands-on training in agricultural production, learned about farm management, sowed rye and wheat, planted vegetables. There they raised saplings for sale to the surrounding population. The work provided my father with a decent salary (fifty rubles) for that time, and my family lived comfortably, in a house near the nursery. Like most people of that pre-revolutionary time, my father was not particularly religious. 11 He went to church on major feasts, but he frequently skipped church on Sundays, and did not always keep the fasts. The rest of the family followed suit. An abrupt change in my father's worldview came soon after the Revolution, when he became acquainted with a certain layman by the name of Ivan Savich Mironov. He was a family man, no longer young, a profound believer and well versed in patristic literature. His was a strong and unique personality, and he had a great influence on my father. He introduced him to many spiritual books, which changed completely my father's views. Among these books were the Nomocanon and Great in Small. The former (containing the statutes of the Orthodox Church) indicated to him the path to salvation, while Nilus's book, Great in Small, convinced him that we have already drawn close to the time of Antichrist. My father began frequently to reflect on the fact that the end of the world and the Last Judgment might come soon, and that he, meanwhile, was living so carelessly, without any concern for his soul. And so it was that my father, who before had been so indifferent, became an ardent believer, an Orthodox zealot, and he devoted the rest of his life to God and the Church. He began to keep strictly the Orthodox canons, and did not miss any church services. In spite of the increasing persecution and his prominent position in the town, he openly went to church and took an active part in church life. My mother followed his example. My parents began to help orphans, the elderly and sick; they welcomed in our home pilgrims and monastics. Our entire family became acquainted with the books, Nomokanon, Great in Small, and other spiritual books that Mironov gave us, and we wholeheartedly embraced the truth of Orthodoxy. And when we realized the terrible and menacing character of the Soviet regime, we all clung to the Church as to a ship of salvation. From that time our family began attending church services on Sundays and feastdays without fail. In the mornings we all gathered together for prayer, and we did the same in the evening before going to bed. Our father manifest the most zeal. Often he would even get up at night to pray and make many prostrations, sometimes provoking demonic attacks. Our family began strictly to keep the fasts. On Wednesdays and Fridays, according to the ancient practice, we did not eat until three o'clock in the afternoon, regardless of what hard work there was to do. On the eve of Nativity and on other strict fast days, none of us ate anything "until the first star." In addition, we daily read together the New Testament, a chapter each day. Our home became a kind of monastery. I should mention that earlier my father had expressed a decided sympathy for leftist parties. In the 1905 Revolution, in defending the rights of the peasants, he came into conflict with a local landowner, as a result of which he spent a month in jail. Now he became convinced that the leftist parties were not in fact on the side of truth, as had been his impression before; on the contrary, they were directed against truth, and, principally, against the truth of God and against the Church. My father straightway abandoned his former leftist persuasions and became a convinced monarchist. He very quickly grasped the essence of the Soviet power, seeing in it an evident manifestation of antichristian principles. When, in the '20s, they instituted a "five-day" and a "six-day," workdays began falling often on Sundays. My father categorically refused to work on Sunday. He himself did not work, and he forbade the workers at the nursery (by this time the nursery had become government property) to go out to work. He was lectured several times on 22 this account, and the authorities threateningly demanded that he submit to the decrees of the powers that be, but he replied that he would not work on Sundays or major Orthodox feastdays, since it was forbidden by the church canons. In view of the exemplary state of the nursery, the local authorities tolerated my father's behavior for a time, but my father understood that this would not last, and at home he often prayed, "Lord, grant me to suffer for Thy Name's sake!" Finally, in 1928, my father was arrested and sent to Siberia. In the local GPU he was told: "We know you are an irreplaceable worker, but because of your religion we can no longer tolerate you. We have to send you away!" My father was forced to walk more than a thousand kilometers through Siberia, in temperatures reaching sixty below, spending nights in freezing cold yurts. Conditions were so unbearably difficult that my father asked God to die. Finally, he was brought to civilization, to a small village on the island Kezhma, on the Angara River. There he lived some three years. The villagers treated him with love and respect. They visited him and brought him food, and he conversed with them on spiritual subjects and read to them from the Scriptures. Whenever he encountered any of them, he would greet them with whatever feast it was. For this he was charged with "religious agitation" and was sentenced to ten years in the isolated Krasnoyarsk prison. At his arrest and during subsequent interrogations, my father showed himself to be fearless, although ordinarily he was very meek. And there in the prison, over the protests of the guards, my father would daily stand for prayer at the appointed times, fulfilling his rule. One of his fellow prisoners told me that being in the same cell with my father was for him a great consolation, while another said, "In the company of such a man as your father, one could bear a lifetime in prison." But my father's daily habit of prayer infuriated the employees of the GPU, and another ten years were added to his sentence. In all, he received twenty years. I visited him once, when he was in the prison at Karsnoyarsk. I never saw him again. After my father's arrest, our family was evicted from its home near the nursery. My mother went to live with my sister in Sinelnikovo, while my brothers went to the Caucasus, where they found work as horticulturalists. After Krushchev's amnesty, my father was released. He was by that time already very old. He went to live with my sister in Sinelnikovo, and there he died. Years of Revolution My childhood was spent in the town of Alexandria, in the country, in the field and in the garden, for from an early age I was already helping my father with his work.